Monday, March 9, 2015

Apple Tool Could Transform How Doctors Gather Your Data

Apple's new iPhone platform could enable doctors to dramatically increase the amount of health data they can gather on patients, the company says.

The company revealed the platform, called ResearchKit, today at a talk at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California. ResearchKit allows doctors to develop their own apps to gather data on people's health conditions, from asthma to Parkinson's disease. The new system also makes it easy for medical researchers to enroll patients in clinical trials, a typically expensive and slow process.

So far, doctors have developed apps on this platform to studyParkinson's disease, blood sugar variability, asthma triggers, breast cancer recovery and cardiovascular health. But because the development platform is open source, meaning that anyone who wants to develop an app can do so, many more clinical trial apps could soon follow, said Dr. Michael McConnell, a cardiovascular medicine professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.